The Curious Incident of the Boxes; A Tussle Over a Cache of Conan Doyle's Artifacts Ends With an Auction

For 25 years the cardboard boxes, more than a dozen of them, sat in a corner of a London office, gathering dust while lawyers argued about whom they belonged to and scholars dreamed about what was inside. But the auction this Wednesday of their contents, once belonging to Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, has provoked another fight and a mystery almost worthy of Holmes himself.

The Conan Doyle archive -- including his unpublished first novel, a rich cache of family letters and handwritten literary notebooks full of research and musings about works in progress -- is expected to bring in about £1 million to £1.5 million ($1.8 million to $2.7 million), according to Christie's, which is handling the sale. But even as that auction house has attracted a stream of Conan Doyle enthusiasts thrilled at the newly released material, it has also been sharply criticized by some scholars and members of Parliament for allowing the sale because they say crucial legal questions remain unresolved.

They also say that the material is too important to be sold off piecemeal. ''This will make it impossible for one academic or team of researchers ever to access the entire collection for a definitive biography of Conan Doyle,'' Kevin Pringle, a spokesman for Alex Salmond, a member of Parliament from the Scottish National Party, said of the auction. ''The material will be scattered to the four winds.''

Adding to the sense of unease is the mysterious death of Richard Lancelyn Green, a leading Conan Doyle scholar and private collector, and a vociferous opponent of the sale. On March 27 Mr. Lancelyn Green, 50, a former chairman of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London and the author of several well-received books on Conan Doyle, was found garroted to death, strangled by a shoelace wrapped around a wooden kitchen spoon used to tighten its grip.

Mr. Lancelyn Green had become increasingly agitated and worried for his safety in the days before he died, several friends and family members told the inquest into his death. The coroner in the case said that he could not rule out murder and recorded an open verdict, meaning that he did not conclude what led to Mr. Lancelyn Green's death, although he said that he ''would not wish to stress the importance of any conspiracy theories.''

Owen Dudley Edwards, a reader in history at the University of Edinburgh and a Conan Doyle scholar who was a close friend of Mr. Lancelyn Green, said he did not believe Mr. Lancelyn Green committed suicide. The two had teamed up to stop the Christie's sale, he said, and Mr. Lancelyn Green had been concerned that people connected to it would seek to damage his reputation.

''I think he was bewildered by the sale, as we all were,'' Mr. Dudley Edwards said. ''But I was speaking to him about 12 hours before his death, and I didn't have the slightest impression of him being suicidal.''

Everyone seems to agree on one thing: the materials to be sold are a treasure trove. ''I would say that some of it is very important,'' said Catherine Cooke, curator of the Sherlock Holmes collection at the Marylebone Library in London. She singled out letters from Conan Doyle's younger brother, Innes, and oldest son, Kingsley, who both served in World War I and died of illnesses contracted during or just after it.

There is also fascinating correspondence with public figures like Winston Churchill, P. G. Wodehouse, Theodore Roosevelt and Oscar Wilde. There is Conan Doyle's tan lizard-skin wallet, left as it was when he died in 1930, its contents yellowed and faded. There are little cartoons he drew, presumably for his children, and ample materials related to lesser-known aspects of his life, including his early career as a doctor; his campaign to convince the British military to issue its soldiers body armor; his involvement with cricket; and his experiences as a medic in the Boer War in South Africa.

There is also an unpublished novel -- Conan Doyle's first, written in the mid-1890's -- about a certain Mr. Smith and his battles with gout, among other things. Conan Doyle thought the manuscript had been lost in the mail and once wrote that ''my shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again -- in print.''

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Tom Lamb, director of the book department at Christie's in London, said the papers represented a valuable ''personal corpus'' for Conan Doyle. While many other of his manuscripts and papers, sold off by his profligate sons years ago, are more concerned with public aspects of his life, Mr. Lamb said, ''This material gives you the clues to Conan Doyle the man.''

The unavailability of the material has frustrated and tantalized Conan Doyle scholars for years. A 1949 biography by the American mystery writer John Dickson Carr drew on the papers and included a list without going into detail about their contents, and a French biographer read them in the 1960's, but no researchers have been allowed to see them since. ''Having access to these papers will really open things up,'' Miss Cooke said. But like some other Conan Doyle scholars, she is troubled by the sale, she said. There is the fear that the collection would be broken up and sold to anonymous collectors uninterested in making them available to academics. And there is a concern about the murky disposition of what remains of Conan Doyle's prodigious estate.

After the deaths of Conan Doyle and his second wife, Jean, the bulk of the estate went to one of their sons, Adrian. Portions were sold by him and his brother, Denis, although Adrian kept a core group of private papers intact. Neither Denis nor Adrian had children; nor did their sister, Jean. By the late 1980's, with the family having feuded for years over the remaining papers, the only direct relatives left were Adrian's widow, Anna Conan Doyle; and Jean, who had become Dame Jean Bromet. They agreed that they would each get a 50-percent interest in the papers. Dame Jean, who died in 1997, bequeathed hers to the British Library; Anna, who died in 1990, bequeathed hers to three distant relatives whose names have not been made public. It is Anna's portion that is for sale.

The idea seems to have been that the material would be split evenly. But curiously only 2 of a total of 15 boxes went to the British Library, the library says. That state of affairs has led scholars like Mr. Dudley Edwards, who was friendly with Dame Jean and who would like to see the whole collection in the hands of the British Library, to question the division of the materials.

''It's very difficult to see how the division could have been equal between Anna and Jean since there are only a few papers for Jean against this enormous tranche of stuff for Anna,'' Mr. Dudley Edwards said.

British Library officials said that they had asked Anna Conan Doyle's beneficiaries for a list of how the material was divided but were turned down.

''We have received assurances from the executors that the division represents what Dame Jean's wishes were,'' said Clive Field, director of scholarship and collections at the British Library. ''We're not necessarily challenging the legality, but what we're saying is that their assurances should be capable of being validated by documentary material, which they're not providing to us. This is a matter of significant national and international interest, and as a public body we must exercise due diligence.''

A spokeswoman for Christie's, Clare Roberts, said the auction house was satisfied that its sale was proper. ''Dame Jean had those items in her possession that she owned at the time of her death, and she left them in her will to the British Library,'' Ms. Roberts said. ''In terms of how the family's split up things between them, that's nothing to do with us.''

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A version of this article appears in print on May 19, 2004, on Page E00001 of the National edition with the headline: The Curious Incident of the Boxes; A Tussle Over a Cache of Conan Doyle's Artifacts Ends With an Auction. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe